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Tuesday, April 29, 2003

Damien is Also Worrying About UK Property

Damien Smith takes time to chuckle at Henry Tricks musing on Roger Bootle. This last name keeps coming up, one day I must find the time to see the argument. Among other reasons my dad once worked as a chauffer to a mayor of Bootle. He was only along for the ride, but he did learn a lot about architecture, some of which he passed on to me.

My eyes normally glase over at property columns, but the FT's new Property Editor, Henry Tricks, made me laugh:

"Roger Bootle of Capital Economics, author of The Death of Inflation, believes low inflation will eventually depress all asset prices, including housing. Bootle argues that, like reckless price/earnings ratios at the peak of the equity bull market, house-price-to-income ratios in the UK housing market are at perilous highs - and will fall 20-30 per cent over the next few years to return to their long-term average. However, even he acknowledges that homeowners do not behave as rationally as economic science suggests we should. His is a case in point. As "Economics Man", he would have considered short-selling his six-bedroom Georgian house on the River Thames in Richmond if a market for such a property existed. As a family man, he realises that would be perfectly foolhardy. "It might be quite difficult to persuade mywife." "

Tricks (in the Weekend section, no less) is trying to hold out hope that the UK's housing bubble will not crash. Given the current market, he may be a little to sanguine, but you have to admire his optimism.
Source: Indiawest
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About

Edward 'the bonobo' is a Catalan economist of British extraction based in Barcelona. By inclination he is a macro economist, but his obsession with trying to understand the economic impact of demographic changes has often taken him far from home, off and away from the more tranquil and placid pastures of the dismal science, into the bracken and thicket of demography, anthropology, biology, sociology and systems theory. All of which has lead him to ask himself whether Thomas Wolfe was not in fact right when he asserted that the fact of the matter is "you can never go home again".

He is currently working on a book with the provisional working title "Population, the Ultimate Non-renewable Resource".

Apart from his participation in A Fistful of Euros, Edward also writes regularly for the demography blog Demography Matters. He also contributes to the Indian Economy blog . His personal weblog is Bonobo Land . Edward's website can be found at EdwardHugh.net.